Why is it taking so goddamn long to finish counting ballots?

I’m working on a longer piece explaining the whole ballot counting process (and why switching the ballot deadline to received by election day won’t much speed things up), but if you’re wondering why King County could tally 71,915 ballots on Monday, but only 18,236 today of the approximately 80,000 ballots it had on hand, well, that gets to the heart of one of the factors most responsible for slowing down the count: a lot of voters just can’t seem to follow instructions.

According to King County Elections Chief Communications Officer Kim van Ekstrom, over 17 percent of the ballots received this cycle needed to be “duplicated” so that they could be properly read by the optical scanners. Sometimes it’s due to a damaged ballot or stray marks, but often it’s due to voters not properly filling in the circles, or using the wrong color pen. Voters are clearly instructed to use a black or dark blue pen (the scanners are specifically designed not to read red or green), but King County voters apparently own a rainbow of writing utensils.

Over 17 percent! That’s well more than 100,000 duplicated ballots in King County alone.

So the reason why the remaining ballots are taking so long to count is that these are the ballots that took a detour through the process, either due to a missing or mismatched signature, or the need to duplicate the ballot before scanning. And, well, that just takes time.

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What was your prediction of percentage outcome between Murray and Rossi? I just saw the total for the Senate Race at this moment as 52.15% for Murray and 47.85% for Rossi.

What poll had the best voter sample? it looks like as Rasmussen is taking over for Gallup with the most warped numbers. I realize a 100k votes is not much for a 2.38-2.4 million votes, but it seems that those who said Rossi was ahead, either got their sample size wrong..

What do you feel about Clark County? It was pretty strong toward Rossi, is Southwestern Washington becoming a GOP stronghold? or is it mid term voting skewered any trend?

So, riddle me this: Kevin Haistings showed up at my door tonight to check that I mailed in my ballot. He had a list of ballots returned because of missing/incomplete signatures and mine was one of them. How did he get access to that information? I refrained from telling him he could cross my name off his wish list.

He got the list from King County Elections, which is required to give out the list of ballots with unmatched or missing signatures. And if you’re on that list then your ballot has not been counted. You need to contact KC Elections.

Following up on Goldy’s reply to Carol — she needs to get in touch with KC Elections ASAP (though not on Thursday, as it’s a holiday).

Carol’s vote in LD45, House Position 1, isn’t her only not-yet-tallied vote. Take care of that signature mismatch, Carol, so that we can add one to the counts for Patty, Eric, Larry, and Charlie. As well as Roger.

The really late ballots in Pierce County generally come from military voters. They have their home of record in Washington, regardless of where they signed up. They may have been from NY, CA or VA originally, but when they get to WA, they change their home of record to WA, so they get no more state income tax out of their pay. And they keep it in WA, regardless of how many times they are reassigned.

So you have a bunch of military voters voting in the last WA precinct where they lived here. And these folks tend to vote Republican.

Zeig Hans may pull it off, but I think we are looking at a hand recount. Only 350 ballots left in all of Pierce County …

First “Goldy” is admitting that Democrats have a harder time filling out ballots because they’re old, young, dumb, etc. Now he’s expressing concern about the time it’s taking for King County Elections to enhance ballots? What next, a 33 paragraph diatribe against Dean Logan and Ron Sims?

Someone get an APB out for David Goldstein because I think Stefan Sharkansky has taken him hostage and is blogging in his stead…

I checked on the King County ballots of myself, my wife, and my three sons tonight. We all deposited ballots in the downtown drop box or mailed them by election day. Three of us had by tonight passed the signature exam, but were still waiting for processing, while two were still awaiting the signature review. Five ballots still not counted.

@20 I’m pretty sure that’s the final status update. They have no way of tracking when an individual’s ballot is actually counted. Once your signature is verified and your ballot is removed from the mailing envelope it loses all connection to you.

@19: When Bush was Sworn in January of 2001, we were running a surplus, and had a national debt of 5.6 Trillion. When Obama was sworn in January of 2009, the debt had increased almost 5 Trillion, and a trillion dollar deficit was already baked into the cake for 2009. The Bush Administration is responsible for almost half the outstanding debt. Obama inherited a collapsing economy that required a large stimulus (mush larger than we actually did), in order to save us from another Great Depression. Don’t blame the $13 Trillion on the “libs”.

@ Mr. Baker- Thanks! I couldn’t find that information last night. I received the same message. @ Sarge- I am not an idiot. I signed my ballot, but in the years since registering have shortened my everyday signature to my first initial and last name instead of first name, middle initial, last name on my voter registration. I signed with my everyday signature out of habit and neglected to match it with the envelope. I admit that was dumb, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t know how to follow directions. It means that I am a creature of habit. HOWEVER, the minute I got the form from elections to correct my signature, I did so and mailed it in that same day. That was @ least 10 days prior to the election. If nothing else, I think when all is said and done, and all the votes counted, Washington State will have a huge percentage of voter participation, and will be clearly a majority of Democratic voters. And maybe the election boards will realize the need to hire more help, begin processing votes early in the mail-in cycle and streamline the process.

Your returned ballot packet will soon be opened and your ballot will be prepared for counting.

Thank you for participating in this election.

A quick read through the other responses will tell you that other voters have recieved the same message even though their ballots were turned in on time. Also, I was visited by a candidate who told me he was checking to make sure I had corrected my signature and mailed it in, a candidate who is clearly losing and is hopeful that enough ballots will allow him to win. I didn’t see his documentation, so other than what he told me, I don’t know what he based that on.

Goldy, about that ‘color’ scheme problem, I remember just a couple of years ago there were warnings on various blogs about using a “Bic” Black pen. That green & red was part of the mix to create the color Black.

I had already filled out most of my ballot with a Black Bic. Looked at it under a bright light and could clearly see the discrepancy of the colors. So I went over each oval with another black non-Bic pen.

So I’m not sure you can paint a broad blanket that voters merely couldn’t follow directions.

Thanks folks for the address to check the status of my ballot! Happy to see my vote counted.

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